I Suck

It's been way too long since I last posted. I even had a fairly good food trip to NYC that I never got around to posting about. The store has been sucking my mine. Oh sure, I always blame it on the shop but seriously, small business owners definitely know what I'm talking about when I talk about my lack of time and energy.

So what has gotten me out of my non-posting slump? A change of seasons perhaps. Fall is certainly upon us in New England. Luckily our CSA share doesn't end until the end of October so we've gotten to see what the change in seasons brings.

Tonight we're having a couple of friends over. One is an old friend I've known forever and another is a fairly new friend I'm introducing to E. Infact the old friend asked what time for dinner, I said 8 and she said she'd be here around 6:30. That's how we roll.

So when I went to the CSA on Monday, I knew I wanted some stuff that we could cook or share with friends. I was happy to see heads of lettuce and some last of the summer cherry tomatoes. I grabbed a couple of green peppers so I could make a salad and Beth's favorite salad dressing to go with it. I also was thinking of making an apple tarte tatin. In my family, the only apples we cooked with were Granny Smiths. We're a family that really enjoys tart with our sweet. So alas no GS were to be found but they did have plums. I found this kinda cool because I always only thought of plums as an early summer or late spring fruit. I didn't know they were still even really in season. So I grabbed a container of plums and decided that I wanted to try and make Evan Kleiman's plum sour cream pie. The recipe is here.

I also really wanted to try and make an apple tarte tatin. My friend Caroline makes one every fall and she uses puff pastry dough. So I went ahead and looked for a recipe on epicurious and found this one.

So I was going to attempt two new recipes. I wasn't 100% that either would work out well. Infact, I was a bit concerned that the desserts would be a big fail but I hadn't been baking in so long that I wanted to try something new.

I started by cutting up the plums. Look how pretty!




It seemed like a lot of plums and Evan didn't really say now many. So I decided to make two pies. I ended up doubling the sour cream mixture. Unfortunately, as I was pouring the plums and sour cream into the pie crusts I started to realize that maybe there was too much sour cream stuff and should have just stayed with one pie. My hunch was confirmed because the pies took close to 2 hrs to cook. Eeek. They looked cute coming out of the oven though:



Look! Pie crust cozies, teehee. Anyway, I let the pies cool and snuck a piece. The filling wasn't right at all. It was lumpy and not sweet enough. I was kinda bummed but hoped that the ice cream a guest was bringing would help disguise the issue.

I moved into the apple tartin.


I followed the recipe down to the letter and when it came time to flip, the middle of my apple tartin was completely burned. I was so sad. I even used less time than what the recipe asked for just because I knew our oven ran hot (damn electric!)

Sigh. Well luckily, Jenny did bring ice cream that that helped. It also helped that E made an amazing pasta dinner. But E making an amazing dinner is to be expected.

Since it's fairly early in the fall season, I think I will be attempting the apple tartin again. Watch out apple tartin, I'm gonna make you my bitch for sure! ;)

Not Quite Daring, More Along the Lines of Cute and Sweet

I was very, very excited about this month's Daring Baker Challenge. I was starting to get discouraged with the sheer amount of butter cream I was making every month. I've never been a fan of the taste of butter cream and so it was starting to feel like it was seeping out of my pores.

So I was so happy to see the Challenge take a new turn this month. Eclairs!!!!! The basic form for the recipe this month was from famed Pierre Herme. The rules stated by our lovely host blogger said that we needed to keep at least one chocolate element. Hmmm, nice. That wasn't going to take much arm twisting for me.

Lately, I've been craving Nutella. I can't keep it in the house because much like dulce de leche, Nutella falls into the category of Crack for me. So I thought I'd do a challenge that included nutella in some way, shape or form.

I decided that I'd make a Nutella "pastry" cream by mixing it with whipped cream and piping it into the pastry shells. This challenge was not only going to be interesting to me (as all of them are) but actually was going to be something I was excited about eating too.

I've never worked with choux pastry before and because there is a heating step to making the dough, I always assumed that choux was hard to make. And that couldn't have been further from the truth!

Luckily, E had already gotten all the ingredients together for us to use. So all I had to do was measure and mix. After I quickly measured and dumped everything into the heavy bottomed pan for heating, including the flour! Eeeek, I had to dump out my first try on the mix due to my flour mistake, but even still, the dough came together fast.

It looked really cool in the bottom of my pan. One cute little dough ball that later because a fairly sticky and gooey dough. Because I'm a fairly utiliartian cook/baker, I don't know a pastry bag or tips. Instead I loaded the dough into a 10 gallon plastic bag and cut off the tip. I considered making mini eclairs like Elizabeth had done but hers were very cute and I didn't want to compete with such cuteness. So I went the opposite direction and made big fat rounds out of the piped out choux pastry. Into the oven they went. I will say that we had to double, maybe even triple our baking time (well I did, of course, but so did E and she made the mini ones). So the baking time on the challenage seem a bit off. In any event, the puffs came out of the oven looking awesome. Behold!

They smelled divine. Egg-y and buttery. I was really excited. I let them cool and went about making a hole in the side of each of them so I could pipe in my whipped cream/nutella. Once I did that, I went ahead and nuked the nutella (or whole food equivelant that E found for me, thanks babe!) for 40 seconds. It was melty and perfect. After whipping my cream to firm peak form, close to butter, but not quite there, I folded in the melty nutella. Using yet another plastic pouch from my stash. I loaded the nutella whipped cream in and cut off the tip.

Much to my dismay, I couldn't pipe the cream into the holes I made. The choux pastry puffs were a bit more dense that I had imagined. So I gave up and just sliced them down the side and put the cream in the middle. It actually worked out better for me because it meant I could really load up the pastries with that yummy nutella whipped cream. Mmmm....

Afterwards, I drizzled on the glaze that Elizabeth had made for her eclairs. It had Iclandic dark chocolate in it. I broke off a piece and liked it alot. But I'll be honest. I didn't see much difference between that chocolate or hershey's dark chocolate. I guess I'm just a low brow girl ;)

I was very pleased with the final product.
Look at how cute they are! How did they taste? Um, let's see chocolate, nutella, whipped cream and freshly made choux pastry...that's a recipe for delicious!!! Needless to say, I was really pleased with the results. The choux was airy and eggy but still more dense than what I imagined it would be. I was actually very happy with the resulting pastry. Fairly simple to make, fairly cheap ingrediants and teedaaahh, eclairs!

The nutella whipped cream wasn't as complex in flavors as what Elizabeth did with hers. She used local Mexican chcolate bitters and added other spices as well to her filling. But there's something to be said for the simple. And since I was craving nutella, this challenge hit the spot with me!

Thanks for picking this as August's challenge. I absolutely loved it!!

I'm a Buttercream Machine

Or at least that's how I'm feeling these days. With four challenges under my belt and three of them involving cake and buttercream, I feel like I'm well schooled on buttercream and that actually being well schooled came in handy for this challenge.

The recipe called for quite a bit of hazelnuts and when I went to my Ghetto Shaws, there were only three measly 1/2 cup packages of hazelnuts. Arugh. Okay, I already knew I wasn't going to make the "hazelnut praline" hooey but I still grabbed a bag of pecans just incase.

Being that I don't own a food processor, I decided I would try pulverizing my hazelnuts for the cake in my blender. Um not the brightest move. (Sorry that the picture isn't flipped for your viewing pleasure).


The parts of the nuts that got chopped started to get a little gummy in the blender and some parts didn't really get chopped at all. Plus, I got a supreme case of the lazies and didn't toast the nuts (I really should have!) so that meant the big chunks of nuts later got filtered out when the dry mixture put sifted thru the mesh sifter. Whoops!

However, for all my hazelnut mishaps, the batter came together nicely.

It seems light and frothy and I was excited about what sort of cake it would produce.
The cake came out perfectly golden and springy to the touch. I was very, very pleased with the results. Onto the buttercream. Alright, so it wouldn't have been a "drama" if my Granny's hand mixer hadn't died in the middle of making the frosting. Drats!

There was no way I was going to be able to beat the semi soft butter into soft whipped buttercream by hand. What was I going to do? Luckily I remembered that the buttercream recipe from my first challenge, the Dorie Greenspan party cake of March was different in that the butter was melted. So I knew I could melt the butter, allowing me to stir it in by hand and end up with a fantastic buttercream.

And you know what? It worked out great! I had a split second of doubt as I poured the melted butter in and started stirring but it quickly came together.
It was shiny and beautiful if I do say so myself ;)

I started on my ganache. The recipe said use a very good quality chocolate. Hmm...personally I'm a nestle's choco chip girl!


The ganache was so easy to make, and I loved pouring it over the cake. I was suppose to smooth it out and make it look all pretty and uniform but I liked how the cake looked with the ganache dripping down the sides. And since I already knew I wasn't piping out hazelnut praline cream all over it, I left the cake be as is.

Actually, I'm very pleased with how my cake ended up looking. I happened to have friends over the night I was ready to serve it. All agreed the cake was very good. Moist and pleasant enough but not near enough hazelnut flavor. Drats! I really should have toasted those darn nuts. Damn my laziness. Oh well, at least I know now for next time ;)

Daring Bakers May - Apricot and Ginger Opera Cake

I found this month's challenge, well challenging. I tend to love baking but I'm nothing more than a homespun baker. My cakes and cookies always look homemade. A little rough around the edges but tasty nonetheless.

I wasn't sure what flavoring I'd use. I tend to not like the flavor of white chocolate and I've never really done a lot with butter cream b/c all I ever really taste is butter. The mouth feel of butter cream is something I don't tend to enjoy. But I joined this group as a way to grow and learn so if part of the challenge calls for white chocolate and butter cream, well, I'm certainly happy to give it a shot and test it out!

Still uncertain what flavoring I'd do, I took a T-ride to Trader Joes where I was told I'd find almond meal for a fraction of the cost of Wholefoods. While I was at TJ's I noticed fresh apricots. I picked up some of those and got to thinking that one of my favorite flavor pairings is ginger and apricot. Panini, a bakery that has been closed for a while now, use to serve up apricot and ginger scones and they were pretty darn tasty. So I decided that my opera cake would include fresh ginger, fresh apricots, apricot nectar and some white peachello that was leftover from another dinner party.

I came home and go into my crocs and prepped for an evening of baking.

The cake batter came together rather quickly and easily. I grated fresh ginger into the batter and poured some apricot nectar in as well.
But the issue is always my oven. It seems to have two vastly different temperatures. And the result of cooking the cakes at the same time in the same oven based on the Daring Baker instructions resulted in this:

Hmm, I should have known better, since I know that my oven is kinda weird and baked one jelly roll sheet at a time. I went ahead and used the slightly overcooked cake anyway b/c I just assumed that the syrup would moisten it enough.

Into the syrup, I put a serious shot of the peachello and a big chunk of fresh ginger chopped big enough so I could fish it out once it was done cooking.
The apricots I quickly popped into some boiling water and fished out. I let them cool and peeled off their fuzzy skins and set them side.


The mousse also got a shot of grated ginger, apricot nectar and peachello.

The hardest part of this challenge, for me, was the buttercream recipe. I ran into issues when I went to add the boiled sugar (up to 220) to my egg mixture. The sugar did harden but it hardens so quickly that I didn't use quite a bit of it. As you can see, a lot of it ended up on still in the side of my pot and also on the side of my bowl. This buttercream recipe stressed me out. It seemed so wasteful to not even get a chance to use so much of the sugar due to hardening on the side of my pan. Did I do something wrong???
Since Elizabeth had decided to join Daring Bakers too, we decided it would be fun to have a bake off at her place and taste our different takes on Opera Cake. So I decided to put all my cake components into go-to containers and assemble at her place. I would make the glaze her at her place too. Bagged and ready to go, I waited for the bus to take me to Dot.

Little did I know that I'd be waiting for over 40 mins for a bus that would never arrive. Aaaauuurrrgggghhhh. It was so frustrating that I opted to go home and just assemble my cake there.

I opted to glaze the cake the next day after it had chilled a while. Clearly, I need to work on my professional cake glazing skills! Finally it was done.

How did it taste?

I liked it a lot. I wasn't very pleased with the texture of the almond meal from TJ's. Elizabeth had used blanched almonds and made her own meal and I liked the texture of her cake much better. But the flavor of apricot and ginger tasted great with white chocolate. I wish I had used a bit more grated ginger, but I was conservative b/c I didn't know what baking would do to the ginger. Next time, I'll add a lot more! Plus the syrup did moisten up the overcooked cake piece quite a bit and I was very pleased with that too.

I don't think I'll ever go thru the trouble of making an opera cake again but it was nice to try and if you're ever looking for a nice spring flavor combo, I think you can't beat fresh apricot and ginger.